#SONIC YOUTH SUPERSTAR ART SERIES#

Ranaldo’s Karen Revisited opens wide into a blistering din, gnarled feedback and static blossoming into a delicate ambient murmur. And his Radical Adults Lick Godhead Style, a paean to generations of New York kids surviving only on their own creative fuel, unspools around a tense, stabbing theme, as dark and dramatic as the best of what Interpol were offering. Opener The Empty Page is one of Moore’s most ready-made earworms, its riff versatile enough for an explosive solo and the crystalline bridge that follows. Murray Street, recorded in autumn 2001 in their Manhattan studio, close to Ground Zero, might be Sonic Youth’s most staggering guitar album, with Jim O’Rourke helping them realise their angular jam-band dreams. Listen to Sister, and you hear those inchoate ideas emerging. In the late 80s, Moore talked about incorporating elements of pop into Sonic Youth, which became more obvious in the decade to come. Their prowling cover of Hot Wire My Heart is one of the more footloose moments in their catalogue, Crime’s punk anthem barbed with plangent guitars and blown-out bass. If the Pacific Coast Highway evokes images of California’s wondrous coastline, Gordon’s song of the same name makes you fear for the hitchhiking kid on the side of the road, thumb out as the predator pulls up. Sister’s 10 songs continually fuse melee with melody, danger with delight. What’s more, Steve Shelley, a drummer with a preternatural sense for the way the messes Sonic Youth made would move, had settled into his role.

In 1987, they were stepping away slowly from their early no-wave pastiche and their purely bracing tirades, and moving toward the art-rock intricacy and coded accessibility that would remain their hallmarks. Urgent but articulate, Sister captures Sonic Youth at a quintessential crossroads. Sonic Youth: Beauty Lies in the Eye – video If you get from the perfect Teen Age Riot to the powerful Kissability without hearing Sonic Youth’s fundamental songwriting prowess, start again. And Lee Ranaldo, the band’s classic rock doyen, pulls Jimi Hendrix and Joni Mitchell into Hey Joni, a song balanced by bright harmonics and shrieking distortion and driven by a sense of trying to outrace the past. One track later, Kim Gordon’s The Sprawl, inspired by the writing of William Gibson, lulls you with chanted vocals before the guitars split into bedlam, scoring a dystopian daydream. During its first seven songs alone, Thurston Moore lets Silver Rocket, an explosive rock hit waiting in the wings, collapse in a conflagration of smoking amps. Essentially from the start, though, three distinctive songwriters powered the band in tandem, creating records that felt like rollercoasters – perhaps none more so than Daydream Nation. Sonic Youth sometimes get a reductive rap for just making a racket. This is the record that would rightfully earn Sonic Youth a major-label deal and a spot in the United States’ National Recording Registry.

#SONIC YOUTH SUPERSTAR ART SERIES#

During 70 breathless minutes, Sonic Youth drift through refracted spoken-word and musique concrète collage, churn through Swans-like rumblings and atonal barrages, and shimmer through a series of pop-rock gems lined with shards of dissonance and sheets of feedback. One of indie rock’s truly sacred texts, Daydream Nation is both a gripping synthesis of the punk, college rock and modern composition that surrounded the young New York band, and a living mood board for so much of what would arrive in the decades to come.

Sonic youth superstar art